A short response to Peter Suber

I'm flattered that Peter Suber picked up my last blog entry. He points out two errors I made:
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(1) He assumes that all OA journals charge publication fees. But most do not. (2) He assumes that OA archiving always requires embargoes. But the majority of green journals, or those allowing postprint archiving, allow it immediately upon publication.

He's right on both points, of course.¹ I was wrong to leave the impression that all open access journals charge publication fees and that open access archiving always requires embargoes. But my larger point still stands.

Roughly 70% of the expenses associated with publishing mainline academic journals, even when published by not-for-profit professional societies,² will remain even if print is entirely eliminated. Someone has to cover that cost. If it's not through up-front charges to authors, then it will be through charges to their institutions (the BioMedCentral model), or through restricting access for a some period so that publishers can recoup their costs before making materials available.

As I say in one of my early slides, “open access is an undeniable public good.” But as my friends in economics and political science point out, figuring out how to pay for public goods isn't easy. If it were, we wouldn't be arguing about the Kyoto protocol or global climate change.